by CCW | 2 April 2014 16:05
This is the third of three Lenten meditations on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio. The first is posted here[1] and the second here[2].
“Then the sermons begin,” one critic of the Purgatorio has observed, commenting on an important and integral feature of the journey of ascent. One of the essential ways of pilgrimage is the way of illumination; one form of illumination is through learning and learning through instruction and discourse. It says, perhaps, more about our world and day than much about Dante’s that we are ambivalent, if not hostile to instruction and learning. Sermons, it seems, are much to be endured and little to be appreciated.
The upward journey of the soul through the cornices of the Purgatorio entails a number of discourses. They are didactic accounts and yet they are fully part of the imaginative ascent of the soul to God. They belong to the essential orthodoxy of Dante’s poetic vision and they relate to a number of critical and important Christian and philosophical and theological ideas. Along with the discourses, there are as well two dreams.
Dreams and discourses. Both contribute to the way of illumination, the path of learning. “Friend, go up higher” could be the refrain of the Purgatorio. The first dream happens in the transition from the terraces of Ante-Purgatory to the cornices of Purgatory proper. The second dream is “the dream of the siren” that appropriately marks the beginning of the purgation of “love excessive” on the last three cornices of Mount Purgatory, the purging of the deadly but lesser sins of avarice, gluttony, and lust.
The discourses deal with an interesting array of questions: questions about the super-expressive nature of the Good which when shared is increased not decreased; questions about love and free will as the explicit counter to all and any kind of material determinism – just one of the ways in which Dante speaks to every age; questions about the forms of bodies, of spiritual bodies; questions, too, about human individuality countering the Islamic Philosopher, Averroes, whose teaching about the “passive intellect” effectively denies the rational and immortal individual soul without which the whole journey is meaningless; but, above all, the discourses underscore the essential insight about amor, love, as the defining principle of the soul’s life and character.
Sin itself derives from love: “love perverted” in relation to the proper objects of love is considered in the sins of pride, envy, and wrath. Then there are the two other categories: “love defective”; and “love excessive.” These last two categories of disordered love are about an improper relation to the objects of love – loving the right object(s) but in the wrong way: either love is lukewarm and weak, in short, defective, like sloth; or love is excessive, too much and too strong, in relation to things, the sin of avarice, to food and drink, the sin of gluttony, and to other persons, the sin of lust. The discourses serve to illumine our understanding about the purgation of the effects of sin on the soul in order to effect the soul’s ultimate union with God.
The dreams, too, belong to the way of illumination. The first dream is about Dante being lifted up on the wings of an eagle to the steps of Purgatory proper, only to learn from Virgil that Lucy, one of the three handmaidens of Beatrice, has been sent “to help him on the road he has to tread.” Lucy is the symbol of illuminating grace and reminds us that the journey is very much a journey of the mind. Theologically, the point is that grace is the moving force and principle of the ascent of the soul to God; grace as always perfecting human nature including “the dullness of our blinded sight” as the ancient hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus, puts it.
The dream of the siren introduces us in an imaginative and powerful way to the effects of the sins of excessive love. It is really an illustration of Dante’s profound dream psychology. It is really about our minds creating a fantasy and an illusion out of our desires; we might call it projection, a projection of something in ourselves outside of ourselves. Dante envisions an ugly woman, “halt of speech, squint-eyed,” with “maimed feet” and “crippled hands, and skin of sallowy bleach.” Hardly attractive; if anything quite repulsive. She is transformed, however, by his gaze which unlooses the string of her tongue and she suddenly becomes beautiful and alluring; her song holds him in her spell. She identifies herself as “the sweet siren … who lead the mariners in mid-sea astray,” an image from the Odyssey of Homer, Ulysses in the Latin form of his name. We are caught in the allure of our own fantasies.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus alone is able to hear the songs of the sirens. His men have their ears blocked with wax while he is lashed to the mast of his ship. Dante is more interested in what the mind’s eye projects out of itself; the issue is the sight of the soul, a question about what we behold and what defines us for good or ill. Enamored in the vision of his own making, he is taken captive by his own desire. It describes how we project our desires and become enraptured by what is false and untrue. It is a problem about vision, about sight and illumination through what is willed; in this case, about what makes the soul false in its relation to the objects of love. Again, as with the first dream, a lady comes to his rescue – she remains unidentified and may stand for the instincts of right habits which signal to the soul that something is amiss. Her indignant tone, as the dream imagines, results in the intervention of Virgil who shows Dante what the siren truly is and he awakens , shocked and perplexed.
Dante is greatly puzzled by the dream and Virgil says that he has seen “the ancient witch” – the references here are oblique but suggest an ancient Rabbinical story about Lillith, “a magical imago” and “a fantasm of Adam’s own desires” (Dorothy L. Sayers) in contrast to the actual and God created reality of Eve. The dream psychology here is remarkable. She is “the projection upon the outer world,” as Dorothy L. Sayers astutely observes, “of something in the mind.”
Virgil upbraids and scolds Dante here; it is one of the rare times in the Purgatorio since he is often there more companion than mentor. “The mount above us weeps,” he says, referring to the cornices of love excessive because of being ensnared by her, by the mind’s projection of its own desires upon the outer world. What is to be done? Banish such thoughts from your mind, “spurn earth beneath thy heels,” Virgil directs and “look only to the lure the eternal King [God] whirls yonder” to draw the soul home to God, like a falconer luring the hawk to his fist.
Then and only then we encounter the souls of the Fifth Cornice, the Cornice of the Covetous. There are three interrelated and interchangeable terms for this sin, the first of the sins of excessive love: covetousness, avarice, and greed. Avaritia is the more common term in the literature of moral philosophy. The sin here is about an excessive love of earthly or worldly things.
How are the souls of avarice imaged? As lying prone upon the ground. Their purgation is their sin itself objectified. Their prayer identifies the character of their sin: “Adhaesit pavimento anima mea,” Dante gives it in its Latin form from the Psalms. It means “my soul cleaveth to the dust,” from Psalm 119. 25. They cleave to the ground with their backs to God. As one of the souls says, “love of all true good was quenched in us by avarice, and our works were left undone.” Such is the excessive love of world things. Their penance is the enduring of their sin while hearing the voices of penitents singing about liberality – the opposite to the acquisitive and possessive nature of avarice – and about other examples of avarice from Scripture and pagan antiquity.
While Dante and Virgil proceed on their way along this cornice, there is suddenly an earthquake. The whole mountain shakes and a shout goes up that seems to be the hymn of all the souls of the penitent on the whole of the mountain. “Gloria in excelsis, in excelsis Deo!” they cry. This, too, contributes to Dante’s perplexity. What is its cause? He is illumined in the next Canto when he and Virgil are joined by another companion who inserts himself into their conversation much like Christ on the road to Emmaus
He is the poet Statius. And he has just been released from his penance and journeys now towards the top of the mountain. The shout is the joy of all the penitents for a soul released from its purgatorial lessons; everyone rejoices in what is another’s good and which will be for them as well. They are all heaven-bound; it is just a question of how and when they are readied for heaven. The release is not something external. As Statius explains, “the will itself attests its own purgation.” This testifies wonderfully to the activity of our souls in the work of purgation. Acquiring virtue and expunging vice means that at a certain point what truly and fully defines the soul is the goodness of God. There is nothing to hold the soul back any longer from the true love of God. And it is for this reason too that the souls now will their own purgatorial pains just as they once willed their sins. The triumph of the grace of God is known inwardly. They will what God wills.
The illuminating events of the Cornice of the Covetous are quite momentous. It is significant, too, that we have acquired another companion. This speaks to another feature of the order of the deadly sins; they are ranked in terms of degrees of mutuality from the least to the most. The sins of excessive love, though sins and completely deadly if they were to be the defining and eternal reality of the soul, are nonetheless somewhat more social. There is a hierarchy of mutuality and sociability ranging from covetousness through gluttony to lust. But the upward journey is one in which community too is acquired.
It may seem that we have strayed from our theme of the Beatitudes but the events of the Cornice of the Covetous contribute to the understanding of the benediction pronounced upon such souls. The fifth ‘P’ is brushed from their foreheads with the words Beati and sitiunt, in other words, “Blessed are they that thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.” Dante has adapted one of the Beatitudes. It reads in its fullness, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” But Dante sees an important connection between avarice and gluttony and divides this Beatitude, applying the verb, ‘thirst’, to the souls of the covetous, and ‘hunger’, as we shall see, to the souls of the gluttonous.
Cornice VI introduces us to the souls of the gluttonous, to those who hoard and spend. In each case it is about being defined by appetite, the physical appetites for food and drink and includes those who are extremely fussy about their food and drink, being defined by their tastes and expectations to an excessive extent. It would seem that Dante’s vision captures the foodies of every culture! How are they imaged? As starving and thin, their penance is the opposite of their sin. Their prayer is “O Lord, open thou my lips” not to consume but to praise God. Our mouths are opened for other purpose than to please our appetites. It belongs to the journey of Lent as the 17th century poet, Robert Herrick, reminds us. The purpose of Lent is “to starve thy sin not bin.” This is what the gluttonous are doing; they are reminded that their excessive appetites are not the truth of their humanity. They are learning the virtue of temperance as the counter to their immoderate appetites. Their Beatitude is the blessing of hungering after the righteousness of God.
The Seventh and final Cornice is the Cornice of the Lustful and here, finally we encounter an image for sin and its purgation which we might have long expected but have not yet seen, the image of fire. Dante is quite economical, as Dorothy L. Sayers observes, with his use of fire both in relation to the eternal punishments of the souls in Hell and in relation to the penances of Purgatory. And yet the logic is compelling and wonderful. We learn, actually, that all have to go through the pass of fire, not just the lustful for whom it is particularly appropriate. There is the profound sense that all the sins are interrelated and that the ultimate purgation must be the cleansing fire, the refiner’s fire, to use the Biblical imagery, that belongs to our being purified and perfected.
Fire is at once an image of Lust (and love!) as well as an image of Purity. The combining of these two aspects of the image is part of the poetic genius of Dante. The souls of the lustful are depicted as running in two groups, one group running in one direction and the other in the opposite and in their fleeting moment of meeting they exchange swift and, one must say, chaste embraces. There is a sense here of community being restored. Lust, after all is the most mutual of sins. It implies the other.
The lustful divided in two groups represent unnatural and natural lust; what we might call homosexual and heterosexual love, terms which are completely foreign to Dante, but at issue is a kind of excessive love, a form of disordered love. The image of their embracing swiftly and chastely in the course of their running is quite powerful. What is being purged in them is the fire of lust in order to awaken in them the fire of love; whether it is marriage or the forms of friendship what is sought is the building up of the community of love.
The whole of the Purgatorio in terms of the language of the Prayer Book Penitential Service is about “declining from sin and inclining to virtue” through the grace of God perfecting the human soul in its various true forms and character. The prayer of the lustful is to the God of highest clemency or mercy seeking the purification of our hearts and minds. Their Beatitude is, most fittingly “the blessed[ness] of the pure in heart for they shall see God,” including, it may seem, in one another. Their purgatorial pains purify their souls for the vision of God. Such is the entire project of the Purgatorio.
Both forms of the lustful, though distinguished by the example of their particular sin, share the same whip or encouragement to virtue. It is, of course, Mary’s response to the Angel of the Annunciation. “How shall this be seeing I know not a man?” It is the testimony to her purity and chastity but Mary, too, is the exemplar of all the virtues, the one in whom purity of heart has its highest expression. It is the purity of the heart that is paramount especially in relation to her who is both Virgin and Mother.
Only through the pass of fire can the penitent souls attain the starting point of the earthly paradise from which the greater lessons of divine love can begin to be grasped. We are returned to our starting point, but only after the pains of the Purgatorio allow us to be “crown’d and mitr’d over [ourselves]”, as Virgil says to Dante, masters of our own souls who are at last ready to behold the vision of blessedness. For Dante it is glimpsed in Beatrice, she whose name means “thrice-blessed”. It is she who chastens and then instructs him and bids him “guarda e escolta,” look and listen to the final teaching, the sacramental teaching of the Pageant of Revelation and its opposite, the sad division between Church and State in the world, the image of the betrayal of the proper forms of love. Through the waters of Lethe (forgetfulness) and Eunoe (good will or benevolence) and by virtue of these final pageants of instruction we shall be made “pure and prepared to leap up to the stars.”
May it be so for us in the journey of our souls.
Fr. David Curry
The Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio III
April 1st, 2014
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